94 Responses to Arctic Meltdown Update

Steve, I don’t understand this one even though I agree that “Climate science is about propaganda, and never telling the truth about anything” — but how does this one help them?

Let us pretend they are telling the truth for a moment. (I know, I know) They say it is a storm that “is going to melt the north pole”. That is a storm and not “global warming”. Hell, it is not even the wishy-washy “climate change” they are hiding behind now. How does a natural storm help prove man made, CO2 caused global warming??

Then there is the problem that it is just a few days from January and the cold, cold winter when the ice will refreeze. What good does whining about ice cover do now when it will soon re-freeze if any ice is lost. (as it always has done in the past)

I think this one will make them look real bad as winter unfolds. They will have to send this one down the memory hole. But there is this guy some call Steve Goddard (Tony) that will reach down in that hole and remind us of what they are saying today. (about May I bet)

The Atlantic had a big headline about the North Pole about to be above freezing. However the actual report was about a town by that name in Alaska. Penthouse Sidebar (@drfessel) posted the link to the Time Magazine and said

This has to top all. Time Magazine article on the warm weather at the North Pole.

I saw it but I had to step away before I could save it. By the time I got back they removed it and covered their tracks.

This of course was too good an opportunity to miss so we have “One buoy 300 km from the pole reported temperatures just above freezing for an hour yesterday. Another buoy a mile away did not report any above freezing temperatures.”

And of course we all know about how much NOAA and their buddies LOVE to adjust temperatures…..
Of course 42 F (6C) is a lot warmer than 32F (0C) but it is the headline that counts and EMOTING, not scientific accuracy.

And yes there was a bit of a warm spike yesterday. (Blue line is freezing)

Unfortunately… Per usual.. The Hoaxers attacked with lies and bullshit… And have spread moved on to the next calamity.. Misleading people to think this town de Santa “North Pole” .. Is really the North Pole and not the town of North Pole in Alaska…

Anyone… HOW CAN WE head off this kind of shit BEFORE the Hoaxers fabricate it?? Why are we always caught researching and fact checking the lies after the fact…

Hey markstoval! While Tony and you (me too!) will certainly remember the details of this nice little PR blurb, the average CAGW enthusiast will only remember the bit about “the North Pole is melting!” I guarantee you (and remind me if I am wrong) that even as soon as next week, if you find a warmist who remembers this episode, they will tell you something like “only last week the North Pole was melting! It is the middle of winter and the North Pole is melting! How can you deny that the polar cap is almost gone?!”

All they will understand is “North Pole” and “melting”. Therefore (in their imagining) all the ice at the North Pole is gone. Any nuance will have disappeared.

I would simply tell them I look at the Arctic ice everyday from a satellite view and assure them it was there this very morning. If they continue spouting drivel I take them off my “speak to” list. Life is too short to deal with total stupid.

There is huge amplitude in the jet stream, with warm air surging north, all the way to the North Pole. After being zonal for so long, it is inevitable that sooner or later the jet stream would buckle. That is a weather event and has nothing to do with global warming or climate change.

Andy DC, yes I’ve noticed the same thing following the Climate Reanalyzer and GFS model output each day. This is purely weather and will only be a tiny blip over a 30 year or longer climatological period.

I have also noticed consistent large differences between two high latitude buoy stations north of Alaska with one reading about 10F or more higher than the other day after day over months, which can’t be accurate. Ideally these automated stations should have three temperature sensors for QA/QC like the USCRN stations to minimize the chance of bad readings making it out to the public.

With the jets now ‘loopy’ instead of zonal, I expect more of these weird weather patterns with 7 foot snow drifts on the Mexican border and warming in the Arctic. Unfortunately instead of figuring out WHY the change from zonal jets to meridonial (changes in ozone from changes in the sun) we will just get fed more Alarmist hype.

It does help them when they operate in the absence of significant alternative opinions in the media. The casual viewer, i.e. most people, will see the story and it will stick in their head a bit just like the other hyped stories they saw previously. It might not get people to be as alarmed as they hope but it does foster acquiescence to the general narrative.

The econazi mentality is the same as in 1980. Real Science is refreshingly versatile at tit for tat and other agitprop-defeating tactics. I am a happy camper here, and with luck we can keep the Petition Project and other show-stoppers growing and evolving.

So the Alarmist is still spinning the Arctic winds that transported the sea ice out the Nares strait as melting. And DENYING Nasa’s explanation.

Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. “Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.

In 2012 it was an Arctic cyclone that “wreaked havoc on the Arctic sea ice cover” by “breaking up sea ice” so yes, it is “business as usual” that it is weather.

A powerful storm wreaked havoc on the Arctic sea ice cover in August 2012. This visualization shows the strength and direction of the winds and their impact on the ice: the red vectors represent the fastest winds, while blue vectors stand for slower winds. Credit: NASA/Goddard Science Visualization Studiohttp://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-seaicemin.html

When discussing long term trends, anything lower than around 90 years of reliable data is cherry picking. This means any discussion of satellite data before around 2070 is pointless, regardless of whether or not one supports the notion of CAGW.

cfgjd is apparently attempting to prove a point, when they’re not even making one.

You have to take notice that 2007 and 2012 were both very low due to weather conditions that year. 2007 not only had a lot of sunny days but warm winds blowing from the south. This both melted and compacted the ice. 2012 had a large storm which dispersed the ice and caused it then to melt out which it would not have done otherwise.

Neither year was AGW connected at all. I’m all for forgetting them as outliers to be honest.

cfgjd— You did pick a reasonably balanced Arctic selection.
However, most of us are quite aware of the PDO, the AMDO and other oscillations which on decadal scales are a major factor in changing the amount of sea ice at the poles, significantly because of local up and down turning causing there to be more or less fresh and salt water.
With that in mind, the Antarctic has been mostly above average, with 2015 being a record since records were kept. The combined polar amount of sea ice has remained the same.

cfgjd— On a previous thread you posted a Japanese record which was unlike anything I have seen from any other source.
Do you have available the sources of the data they have for that graph? If do please state that.
Satellite, weather balloons, Hadcrut 4 do not show anything like that.

I prefer cryosphere today.
It has separately both poles and interactive records on both pages, and in general more into. At the bottom it has the combined sea ice which shows a significantly continuous record.

Andy, you have confused two issues. The ‘more modern’ DMI graph solves the coastal masking problem that previously understated ice. You can use either version, but have to be consistent over the years. This is the ‘new version’ 30% extent graph. You are referring to the 15% extent graph– which like NISDC considers a gridcell ‘ice covered’ even if 85% is open water. NSIDC does not offer a pregraphed 30% version. Nor does Jaxa.
The better indication of ice is 30% extent, although even that is open to debate as a say 75% product would be computable from the raw satellite data. The more partially open ocean water is included in ice extent the more storms and ocean currents influence ice extent as opposed to ‘just’ supposed AGW polar amplification. That is why summer 2012 was anomalously low. An Arctic cyclone compacted sea ice on the leeward side of the Arctic basin, sweeping what normally would have been at least 15% or 30% ice covered Arctic ocean ice free.

DMI switched to the coastal unmasked 15% extent version in 2012, but continues to offer the masked version at a subsidiary site. I double checked before posting. Andy was making doubly incorrect ‘fruit salad’ ice extent comparisons, to which I called his attention.
No bullshit.

ristvan, I have read your contributions on different blogs, and as to suggesting BS to what you have written, I simply would like to state that what you have written seems very learned, thoughtful, careful and worth considering.
Your writing suggests you have a broad background

Tony, with the ‘more modern’ verbiage in quotation marks ristvan was just paraphrasing Andy who seems to have started on multiple threads yet another “wrong graph” campaign against DMI’s “coastal-zones-masked-out” graph *).
——————–
*) For example here:

“That’s because the graph is borked …”
“As DMI replaced this graph with the one without masking they obviously do not monitor it any more as out-dated product and it has gone awol”

Sadly so many miss the point including the media – weather extremes are common and threaten how we live today therefore thought has to be given about how we continue to develop. What is happening today was caused naturally or artificially years ago – so we are thinking of future generations and asking serious questions about the failure of science and politics both driven by greed and money. There will always be a colder year because there was an Ice Age and there was a hotter year because sub tropical animal remains have been found in Northern Europe in permafrost. All that is being reported is the fear and guess work of science. Sadly taxation pays for this tripe. Take each day as it comes and deal with the real issues.

cfgjd says:
December 31, 2015 at 4:10 pm
What bit of it is “lying”? Less sea ice now than…”

FYI, today is Dec.31,2015, so saying “There’s much less sea ice now than …” and showing a graph of ice extent going just to 2002 as you did in your 4:00pm comment is dishonest misrepresentation and lying because it does not show what sea ice is now.

Ice cores from the Freemont Glacier show it went from Little Ice Age cold to Modern Warming warm in the ten years around 1850 — Naturally.

ABSTRACT
An ice core removed from the Upper Fremont Glacier in Wyoming provides evidence for abrupt climate change during the mid-1800s….

At a depth of 152 m the refined age-depth profile shows good agreement (1736±10 A.D.) with the 14C age date (1729±95 A.D.). The δ18O profile of the Upper Fremont Glacier (UFG) ice core indicates a change in climate known as the Little Ice Age (LIA)….

At this depth, the age-depth profile predicts an age of 1845 A.D. Results indicate the termination of the LIA was abrupt with a major climatic shift to warmer temperatures around 1845 A.D. and continuing to present day. Prediction limits (error bars) calculated for the profile ages are ±10 years (90% confidence level). Thus a conservative estimate for the time taken to complete the LIA climatic shift to present-day climate is about 10 years, suggesting the LIA termination in alpine regions of central North America may have occurred on a relatively short (decadal) timescale.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/1999JD901095/full

Dr. Evans Solar Notch-Delay Theory predicts a delay of about 11 years from a change in solar conditions to a change in earth climate.

So what happened around 1840? Solar Cycle 8. It began in November 1833 with a smoothed sunspot number of 7.3 and ended in July 1843. Max sunspot number ~210. The prior Solar Cycle 7,began in May 1823 with a smoothed sunspot number of 0.1 and ended in November 1833. Max sunspot number ~105. And thus began the Grand Solar Maximum, highest in 3,000 years which has just ended.

In the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, Usoskin et al. “present the first fully adjustment-free physical reconstruction of solar activity” covering the past 3,000 years, which record allowed them “to study different modes of solar activity at an unprecedented level of detail.” Their reconstruction of solar activity displays several “distinct features,” including several “well-defined Grand minima of solar activity, ca. 770 BC, 350 BC, 680 AD, 1050 AD, 1310 AD, 1470 AD, and 1680 AD,” as well as “the modern Grand maximum (which occurred during solar cycles 19-23, i.e., 1950-2009),” described as “a rare or even unique event, in both magnitude and duration, in the past three millennia.”http://www.co2science.org/articles/V17/N32/C1.php

Gail, ch doesn’t realize his graph doesn’t say what he’s trying to make it say.
It runs from the LIA to about the present, and just shows Arctic ice higher at the end of the LIA….which could say it’s returned to “normal”

Lifting a graph from Tamino that splices a single pre 1979 recontruction onto the satellite record is hardly good science. There are many other Arctic ice reconstructions that show swings equal to post 1979. And there are actual records for the Russian part going back into the 1920’s because of the significance of the northern passage.

So why wasn’t there a northwest passage cruise this past summer? If what you are claiming were true, then it should have been easy to sail through there. Have you any credible evidence that ANY boats managed to transit through there last summer?

….However, Gerard Roe realized a trivial mistake that had previously been done. And a similar mistake is being done by many people all the time – scientists as well as laymen; alarmists as well as skeptics. The problem is that people confuse functions and their derivatives; they say that something is “warm” even though they mean that it’s “getting warmer” or vice versa.

In this case, the basic correct observation is the following: If you suddenly get more sunshine near the Arctic circle, you don’t immediately change the ice volume. Instead, you increase the rate with which the ice volume is decreasing (ice is melting). Isn’t this comment trivial?

Nigel Calder knew that this was the right comparison to be made back in 1974….

So as I showed above. There was a major change between Solar Cycle 7 and Solar Cycle 8 and that change has continued until now. Therefore you would not expect the ice built up during the LIA or the ocean heat content to change suddenly instead as the ocean got warmer and melted the sea ice from underneath, you would expect something like.

If you send warm air to a “dark place where the sun don’t shine”,
=> it becomes icy cold as it radiates huge amounts of heat.
Thinking a “warm arctic” in winter is anything but scary, is really
……clueless, bullying, eco-religious fanaticism.

and the bottom decadal graph of the Koppen Climate boundaries. This is the plant response to climate and there was a movement of about 200 miles in the boundaries. For the USA Great Plains 1910, 1970 and 1960 were the coolest with the other decades pretty much clustered.

Actually I was a bit surprised at the line up with the Tamino Ice graph. I was not expecting it. Of course correlation does not imply causation but it is always a starting point for further investigation.

I know some cloistered nuns who would be interested in this info but hestitate to send the link lest they be subjected to some vulgar language that appears here in some comments. Don’t you people know any acceptable synonyms, such as balderdash, horsefeathers, utter nonsense, absurdity, insufferable foolishness, meaningless froth, or something from Shakespeare? Thanks.

And AGAIN you ignore the fact that during the first 3/4 of the current Holocene, the Arctic sea ice was often ZERO in the summer.
Current Arctic sea ice levels are anomalously HIGH compared to most of the last 10,000 years, except the LIA that we have thankfully warmed from.

Ok so accelerated decline starts around 1950 for min and 1960 for max. For the minimum there’s another acceleration at around 1990 and then the the minimum hits collapse-zone after 2000 (not shown on graph). 5 million km2 lost at an accelerating pace.

In case anyone may be interested, below is a link to an animation of the GFS temperature forecast contoured for the northern hemisphere out to 384 hours from Sutron MeteoStar. It shows the tail end of the surge of warm air that pushed northeastward across the eastern US and Atlantic and into the Arctic and all the way into Siberia. This specific link will only be online for about 24 hours from the 12/31/15 12Z initialization time.http://wxweb.meteostar.com/models/ipsm_looper.php?PROD=2015123112_NHC_GFS_SFC_TEMP_IMAGE

The GFS has not predicted temperatures above freezing for the North Pole from what I recall, although I do remember seeing temperatures above freezing in Svalbard recently, which is at a very high latitude and received the brunt of the big push of warm air up into the Arctic from the Atlantic.